Related

BEIRUT (Reuters) - When he was agitating for revolution, urging fellow Syrians to rise up against President Bashar al-Assad, Abdullah dreaded the midnight knock at the door from the secret police. Now that the uprising has succeeded in his home town near Aleppo, pro-democracy activists are living in fear again - and this time those who brand them "traitor" don't bother to knock.

BEIRUT — The minaret of a landmark 12th century mosque in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo was destroyed Wednesday, leaving the once-soaring stone tower a pile of rubble and twisted metal scattered in the tiled courtyard.
President Bashar Assad’s regime and anti-government activists traded blame for the destruction to the Umayyad Mosque, which occurred in the heart Aleppo’s walled Old City, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

For the second time in 14 months, dozens of peacekeepers from the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) have been kidnapped in the no-man's-land separating Syria from the Israeli-controlled section of the Golan Heights.

It's now worth $19 billion to Facebook, but it's priceless for Syria's rebel fighters In March 2012, the Syrian government banned the free and safely encrypted messaging application WhatsApp from all national networks, primarily to disrupt the rebel opposition’s cellular privacy. Judging from online search trends, the ban isn’t working. It’s doing the opposite of working.

AMMAN (Reuters) - Syrian intelligent agents abducted Akram al-Bunni, a prominent leftist writer and former political prisoner, as he left a wedding reception at a central Damascus hotel on Saturday, opposition activists said.

Dozens of Syrians demonstrated in Damascus on Tuesday for liberty and political reforms and against corruption, according to witnesses and opposition websites."God, Syria, liberty" and "Syrians, where are you?" chanted men and women inviting their compatriots to join the "peaceful march" which unfolded in a central souk of Old City Damascus, according to videos posted online.Witnesses and a human rights activist told AFP five young men near the Omayyad mosque started shouting the slogans despite a 1963 emergency law that bans demonstrations in Syria.